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Reference - What does this regex mean?
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Closed 6 months ago.
Is it possible to remove duplications with ignoring the punctation marks and spaces in Notepad++? I would keep one of them matching lines (doesn't matter which to keep).
My examples are from the txt file:
Rough work iconoclasm but the only way to get the truth. Oliver Wendell Holmes
Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get the truth. Oliver Wendell Holmes
Rule No. 1: Never lose money. Rule No. 2: Never forget rule No. 1. Warren Buffett
Rule No.1: Never lose money. Rule No.2: Never forget rule No.1. Warren Buffett
Self-esteem isn't everything, it's just that there's nothing without it. Gloria Steinem
Self-esteem isn't everything it's just that there's nothing without it. Gloria Steinem
You said she's a senior? Babe we're all crazy.
You said, she's a senior! Babe we're ALL crazy.
You said, she's a senior? Babe we're ALL crazy!
Result I need:
Rough work iconoclasm but the only way to get the truth. Oliver Wendell Holmes
Rule No. 1: Never lose money. Rule No. 2: Never forget rule No. 1. Warren Buffett
Self-esteem isn't everything, it's just that there's nothing without it. Gloria Steinem
You said, she's a senior! Babe we're ALL crazy.
I can delete 100% matching duplications with regex, but can't find a regex rule to ignore spaces and marks.
I don't think regex is the best tool for this task, but it's a nice challenge. You can match single words using a nested structure like:
((\w+)\W+((\w+)\W+( ... ((\w+)\W+)? ... )?)?(\w*))
When matching this, capture groups 2 to n contain the words 1 to n-1 of a line. The nested structure is necessary to make it non-ambiguous - otherwise, running the regex takes too long.
To match the duplicate lines, we use a similar structure with back-references:
\1\W+(\2\W+( ... (\9\W+)? ... )?)?
This will also match lines that are substrings of the previous line, which is again helpful to improve performance.
Notice that you have to use the \g{n}-notation when using more than 9 references in Notepad++. Moreover, to avoid matching line breaks you should use [^\w\n\r] instead of \W. To further improve performance, unnecessary groups should be non-matching, i.e., (?: ... ).
To generate the rather long regex that solves the problem for, e.g., up to 20 words per line, you can use the following script:
MAX_WORDS = 20
punct = "[^\\w\\n\\r]"
backref = (i) => `\\g{${i}}`
patternKeep = (i) => "(\\w+)[^\\w\\n\\r]+" + (i < 0 ? "" : `(?:${patternKeep(i-1)})?`)
patternRemove = (i) => `${backref(MAX_WORDS-i + 2)}(?:${punct}+` + (i < 0 ? "" : patternRemove(i-1)) + ")?"
console.log("^(" + patternKeep(MAX_WORDS) + "(\\w*))(\\r?\\n" + patternRemove(MAX_WORDS)+ `${punct}*${backref(MAX_WORDS+4)}${punct}*)+$`)
When copying this to Notepad++ with settings "Wrap around" on and "Match case" off and replacing with $1, it will remove all duplicate lines in your example.
I doubt that it can be done purely with regular expressions. If it can then I imagine that the expression would be difficult to understand and difficult to maintain. Instead I would suggest a multi-step approach.
Step 1 - modify each line to be: original-line separator original-line.
Step 2 - convert it to be line-without-punctuation separator original-line.
Step 3 - sort the lines
Step 4 - remove duplicated lines
Step 5 - remove line-without-punctuation and separator leaving just the original line.
In more detail:
In all the replaces below: select "Wrap around", unselect "Dot matches newline", unselect "Match whole word only" and unselect "Match case".
Step 1 - choose a separator, some text that is not punctuation and does not occur in the file. Here I use qqq. Do a regular expression replace of ^(.+)$ with \1qqq\1.
Step 2 - remove any punctuation before the separator. Repeatedly do a regular expression replace of [!',-.:?]+(.*qqq) with \1 until no more replacements are made. This expression matches all the punctuation in the example, but you may need to add more for your full text. Also need to reduce multiple spaces to singles, so repeatedly do a regular expression replace of +(.*qqq) with \1 until no more replacements are made. One final step to handle spaces before the qqq do a regular expression replace of qqq with qqq (this could also use a non-regular expression replace).
Step 3 - sort the lines lexicographically.
Step 4 - remove duplicated lines. Repeatedly do a regular expression replace of ^(.*qqq).*\R\1 with \1 until no more replacements are made.
Step 5 - Remove unwanted text leaving the original line. Do a regular expression replace of ^.*qqq with nothing (the empty string).
If all punctuation can be deleted and the result being a line without punctuation then could simple do a regular expression replace of [!',-.:? ]+ with , a sort and finally a remove duplicates.
Previously this question attracted an answer, but the author deleted it. To me it was so interesting because a special technique was illustrated. In a comment the answerer pointed me towards another thread to read more about it.
After experimenting a bit with that answer, an idea was the following pattern. Settings in NP++ are to uncheck: [ ] match case, [ ] .matches newline - Replace with emptystring.
^(?>[^\w\n]*(\w++)(?=.*\R(\2?+[^\w\n]*\1\b)))+[^\w\n]*\R(?=\2[^\w\n]*$)
Here is the demo in Regex101 - Assumption is, that duplicate lines are consecutive (like sample).
Most of the used regex-tokens can be looked up in the Stack Overflow Regex FAQ.
In short words, the mechanism used is to capture words from one line to the first group (\w++) while inside the lookahead (?=.*\R(\2?+...\1\b))) a second group in the consecutive line is "growing" from itself plus the captures until \R(?=\2...$) it either matches all words or fails.
Illustration of some steps from the regex101 debugger:
The second group holds the substring of the consecutive line that matches words and order of the previous line. It expands at each repetition from optionally itself and a word from the previous line. Separated by [^\w\n]* any amount of characters that are not word characters or newline.
For making it work, matching is done without giving back at crucial points (prevent backtracking).
Related
I have data like this
Giftsbirth;;Basket7;CC
Giftswedding;;Cake4;COD
I am trying to find a regex that will only select the second data (Basket7, Cake4).
From past help I tried something like
^(\w+ [^\v;;]+;;[^\v;]+)?.*
But I know that is not right
Please assist with the regex if you can
You could use a positive lookbehind (?<= to assert what is before is ;; and a positive lookahead (?= to assert that what follows is ;
Use a negative character class [^;]+ to match not a ; to match your values.
(?<=;;)[^;]+(?=;)
You may use
(?:.*;)?([^;\n\r]+);[^;\n\r]+$
Or,
.*?;;([^;\r\n]+)(?:;.*)?
and replace with $1.
Details
(?:.*;)? - an optional substring having 0+ chars other than line break chars, as many as possible, up to the ;
([^;\n\r]+) - Group 1: any one or more chars other than CR, LF and ;
; - a semi-colon
[^;\n\r]+ - any one or more chars other than CR, LF and ;
$ - end of line.
The second regex matches
.*?;; - any 0+ chars as few as possible up to (and including) the first ;;
([^;\r\n]+) - Group 1: any one or more chars other than CR, LF and ;
(?:;.*)? - an optional group matching 1 or 0 occurrences of a ; and then any 0+ chars up to the end of line
The $1 in the replacement is the value you need to keep.
You need to specify more precisely what "the second data (Basket7, Cake4)" means. This looks like CSV data with the ; set as separator, but that would place Basket7 and Cake4 in the third column, since the second column is empty. In order to write a regex that solves this problem in the general case, you need to take into account the full domain of possible lines, and you've only given two examples and let everyone guess what the underlying format and total possible variations might be.
For example, is it always reasonable to assume that that which you're looking for is always preceded by ;; and ends with a ;, and that ;; never occurs in other places than immediately before that which you're looking for? In that case, (?<=;;)([^;]*) captures this. But what if you encounter one of the following lines?
Giftsbirth;;;CC # Here, the thing matched is empty
Giftsbirth;1600;Basket7;CC # Here, the second column isn't empty
;;Basket7;CC # Here, the first column is empty
;;;CC # Here, all but the last column are empty
;;; # Here, all columns are empty
You may experience that various suggestions will give you "the right text", but if you test this on a limited subset that does not account for all variations that can reasonably be expected in the input, you will inevitably have to revise your regex.
Assuming this is a CSV where the fields don't contain literal ;s, and that you don't know anything about the length of any of the fields (and consequently that the second column isn't always empty), but that there are at least three columns, you could consider the regex:
^[^;]*;[^;]*;([^;]*)
(See demo at https://regex101.com/r/vhPNEj/1)
These assumptions may not be correct, but my ability to guess are much worse than yours, since you're sitting with a larger sample size of data. In order to succeed at automating your tasks, it is critical that you learn to modify code to fit your assumptions.
For example, you may want to disregard the cases where the third column is empty:
^[^;]*;[^;]*;([^;]+)
Here the difference is [^;]* changed into [^;]+.
Or you may want to take into account that the first column could contain semicolons when they are wrapped in double quotes, e.g. like "Giftsbirth; Holiday";;Basket7;CC:
^(?:[^;"]*|"[^"]*");[^;]*;([^;]*)
Here the difference is [^;]* changed into (?:[^;"]*|"[^"]*") being either [^;"]* (being all but ; and ") or "[^"]*" (being " followed by anything but ", which includes ;, followed by ").
This question already has answers here:
Closed 10 years ago.
Possible Duplicate:
Extract info inside all parenthesis in R (regex)
I inported data from excel and one cell consists of these long strings that contain number and letters, is there a way to extract only the numbers from that string and store it in a new variable? Unfortunately, some of the entries have two sets of brackets and I would only want the second one? Could I use grep for that?
the strings look more or less like this, the length of the strings vary however:
"East Kootenay C (5901035) RDA 01011"
or like this:
"Thompson-Nicola J (Copper Desert Country) (5933039) RDA 02020"
All I want from this is 5901035 and 5933039
Any hints and help would be greatly appreciated.
There are many possible regular expressions to do this. Here is one:
x=c("East Kootenay C (5901035) RDA 01011","Thompson-Nicola J (Copper Desert Country) (5933039) RDA 02020")
> gsub('.+\\(([0-9]+)\\).+?$', '\\1', x)
[1] "5901035" "5933039"
Lets break down the syntax of that first expression '.+\\(([0-9]+)\\).+'
.+ one or more of anything
\\( parentheses are special characters in a regular expression, so if I want to represent the actual thing ( I need to escape it with a \. I have to escape it again for R (hence the two \s).
([0-9]+) I mentioned special characters, here I use two. the first is the parentheses which indicate a group I want to keep. The second [ and ] surround groups of things. see ?regex for more information.
?$ The final piece assures that I am grabbing the LAST set of numbers in parens as noted in the comments.
I could also use * instead of . which would mean 0 or more rather than one or more i in case your paren string comes at the beginning or end of a string.
The second piece of the gsub is what I am replacing the first portion with. I used: \\1. This says use group 1 (the stuff inside the ( ) from above. I need to escape it twice again, once for the regex and once for R.
Clear as mud to be sure! Enjoy your data munging project!
Here is a gsubfn solution:
library(gsubfn)
strapplyc(x, "[(](\\d+)[)]", simplify = TRUE)
[(] matches an open paren, (\\d+) matches a string of digits creating a back-reference owing to the parens around it and finally [)] matches a close paren. The back-reference is returned.
I saw other questions dealing with the finding the n-th occurrence of a word/pattern, but I couldn't find how you would actually substitute the n-th occurrence of a pattern in vim. There's the obvious way of hard coding all the occurrences like
:s/.*\(word\).*\(word\).*\(word\).*/.*\1.*\2.*newWord.*/g
Is there a better way of doing this?
For information,
s/\%(\(pattern\).\{-}\)\{41}\zs\1/2/
also works to replace 42th occurrence. However, I prefer the solution given by John Kugelman which is more simple -- even if it will not limit itself to the current line.
You can do this a little more simply by using multiple searches. The empty pattern in the :s/pattern/repl/ command means replace the most recent search result.
:/word//word//word/ s//newWord/
or
:/word//word/ s/word/newWord/
You could then repeat this multiple times by doing #:, or even 10#: to repeat the command 10 more times.
Alternatively, if I were doing this interactively I would do something like:
3/word
:s//newWord/r
That would find the third occurrence of word starting at the cursor and then perform a substitution.
Replace each Nth occurrence of PATTERN in a line with REPLACE.
:%s/\(\zsPATTERN.\{-}\)\{N}/REPLACE/
To replace the nth occurrence of PATTERN in a line in vim, in addtion to the above answer I just wanted to explain the pattern matching i.e how it is actually working for easy understanding.
So I will be discussing the \(.\{-}\zsPATTERN\)\{N} solution,
The example I will be using is replacing the second occurrence of more than 1 space in a sentence(string).
According to the pattern match code->
According to the zs doc,
\zs - Scroll the text horizontally to position the cursor at the start (left
side) of the screen.
.\{-} 0 or more as few as possible (*)
Here . is matching any character and {} the number of times.
e.g ab{2,3}c here it will match where b comes either 2 or 3 times.
In this case, we can also use .* which is 0 or many as many possible.
According to vim non-greedy docs, "{-}" is the same as "*" but uses the shortest match first algorithm.
\{N} -> Matches n of the preceding atom
/\<\d\{4}\> search for exactly 4 digits, same as /\<\d\d\d\d>
**ignore these \<\> they are for exact searching, like search for fred -> \<fred\> will only search fred not alfred.
\( \) combining the whole pattern.
PATTERN here is your pattern you are matching -> \s\{1,} (\s - space and {1,} as explained just above, search for 1 or more space)
"abc subtring def"
:%s/\(.\{-}\zs\s\{1,}\)\{2}/,/
OUTPUT -> "abc subtring,def"
# explanation: first space would be between abc and substring and second
# occurence of the pattern would be between substring and def, hence that
# will be replaced by the "," as specified in replace command above.
This answers your actual question, but not your intent.
You asked about replacing the nth occurrence of a word (but seemed to mean "within a line"). Here's an answer for the question as asked, in case someone finds it like I did =)
For weird tasks (like needing to replace every 12th occurrence of "dog" with "parrot"), I like to use recursive recordings.
First blank the recording in #q
qqq
Now start a new recording in q
qq
Next, manually do the thing you want to do (using the example above, replace the 12th occurrence of "dog" with "parrot"):
/dog
nnnnnnnnnnn
delete "dog" and get into insert
diwi
type parrot
parrot
Now play your currently empty "#q" recording
#q
which does nothing.
Finally, stop recording:
q
Now your recording in #q calls itself at the end. But because it calls the recording by name, it won't be empty anymore. So, call the recording:
#q
It will replay the recording, then at the end, as the last step, replay itself again. It will repeat this until the end of the file.
TLDR;
qq
q
/dog
nnnnnnnnnnndiwiparrot<esc>
#q
q
#q
Well, if you do /gc then you can count the number of times it asks you for confirmation, and go ahead with the replacement when you get to the nth :D
I need a regex to get numeric values that can be
111.111,11
111,111.11
111,111
And separate the integer and decimal portions so I can store in a DB with the correct syntax
I tried ([0-9]{1,3}[,.]?)+([,.][0-9]{2})? With no success since it doesn't detect the second part :(
The result should look like:
111.111,11 -> $1 = 111111; $2 = 11
First Answer:
This matches #,###,##0.00:
^[+-]?[0-9]{1,3}(?:\,?[0-9]{3})*(?:\.[0-9]{2})?$
And this matches #.###.##0,00:
^[+-]?[0-9]{1,3}(?:\.?[0-9]{3})*(?:\,[0-9]{2})?$
Joining the two (there are smarter/shorter ways to write it, but it works):
(?:^[+-]?[0-9]{1,3}(?:\,?[0-9]{3})*(?:\.[0-9]{2})?$)
|(?:^[+-]?[0-9]{1,3}(?:\.?[0-9]{3})*(?:\,[0-9]{2})?$)
You can also, add a capturing group to the last comma (or dot) to check which one was used.
Second Answer:
As pointed by Alan M, my previous solution could fail to reject a value like 11,111111.00 where a comma is missing, but the other isn't. After some tests I reached the following regex that avoids this problem:
^[+-]?[0-9]{1,3}
(?:(?<comma>\,?)[0-9]{3})?
(?:\k<comma>[0-9]{3})*
(?:\.[0-9]{2})?$
This deserves some explanation:
^[+-]?[0-9]{1,3} matches the first (1 to 3) digits;
(?:(?<comma>\,?)[0-9]{3})? matches on optional comma followed by more 3 digits, and captures the comma (or the inexistence of one) in a group called 'comma';
(?:\k<comma>[0-9]{3})* matches zero-to-any repetitions of the comma used before (if any) followed by 3 digits;
(?:\.[0-9]{2})?$ matches optional "cents" at the end of the string.
Of course, that will only cover #,###,##0.00 (not #.###.##0,00), but you can always join the regexes like I did above.
Final Answer:
Now, a complete solution. Indentations and line breaks are there for readability only.
^[+-]?[0-9]{1,3}
(?:
(?:\,[0-9]{3})*
(?:.[0-9]{2})?
|
(?:\.[0-9]{3})*
(?:\,[0-9]{2})?
|
[0-9]*
(?:[\.\,][0-9]{2})?
)$
And this variation captures the separators used:
^[+-]?[0-9]{1,3}
(?:
(?:(?<thousand>\,)[0-9]{3})*
(?:(?<decimal>\.)[0-9]{2})?
|
(?:(?<thousand>\.)[0-9]{3})*
(?:(?<decimal>\,)[0-9]{2})?
|
[0-9]*
(?:(?<decimal>[\.\,])[0-9]{2})?
)$
edit 1: "cents" are now optional;
edit 2: text added;
edit 3: second solution added;
edit 4: complete solution added;
edit 5: headings added;
edit 6: capturing added;
edit 7: last answer broke in two versions;
I would at first use this regex to determine wether a comma or a dot is used as a comma delimiter (It fetches the last of the two):
[0-9,\.]*([,\.])[0-9]*
I would then strip all of the other sign (which the previous didn't match). If there were no matches, you already have an integer and can skip the next steps. The removal of the chosen sign can easily be done with a regex, but there are also many other functions which can do this faster/better.
You are then left with a number in the form of an integer possible followed by a comma or a dot and then the decimals, where the integer- and decimal-part easily can be separated from eachother with the following regex.
([0-9]+)[,\.]?([0-9]*)
Good luck!
Edit:
Here is an example made in python, I assume the code should be self-explaining, if it is not, just ask.
import re
input = str(raw_input())
delimiterRegex = re.compile('[0-9,\.]*([,\.])[0-9]*')
splitRegex = re.compile('([0-9]+)[,\.]?([0-9]*)')
delimiter = re.findall(delimiterRegex, input)
if (delimiter[0] == ','):
input = re.sub('[\.]*','', input)
elif (delimiter[0] == '.'):
input = re.sub('[,]*','', input)
print input
With this code, the following inputs gives this:
111.111,11
111111,11
111,111.11
111111.11
111,111
111,111
After this step, one can now easily modify the string to match your needs.
How about
/(\d{1,3}(?:,\d{3})*)(\.\d{2})?/
if you care about validating that the commas separate every 3 digits exactly,
or
/(\d[\d,]*)(\.\d{2})?/
if you don't.
If I'm interpreting your question correctly so that you are saying the result SHOULD look like what you say is "would" look like, then I think you just need to leave the comma out of the character class, since it is used as a separator and not a part of what is to be matched.
So get rid of the "." first, then match the two parts.
$value = "111,111.11";
$value =~ s/\.//g;
$value =~ m/(\d+)(?:,(\d+))?/;
$1 = leading integers with periods removed
$2 = either undef if it didn't exist, or the post-comma digits if they do exist.
See Perl's Regexp::Common::number.
I have a regular expression to match a persons name.
So far I have ^([a-zA-Z\'\s]+)$ but id like to add a check to allow for a maximum of 4 spaces. How do I amend it to do this?
Edit: what i meant was 4 spaces anywhere in the string
Don't attempt to regex validate a name. People are allowed to call themselves what ever they like. This can include ANY character. Just because you live somewhere that only uses English doesn't mean that all the people who use your system will have English names. We have even had to make the name field in our system Unicode. It is the only Unicode type in the database.
If you care, we actually split the name at " " and store each name part as a separate record, but we have some very specific requirements that mean this is a good idea.
PS. My step mum has 5 spaces in her name.
^ # Start of string
(?!\S*(?:\s\S*){5}) # Negative look-ahead for five spaces.
([a-zA-Z\'\s]+)$ # Original regex
Or in one line:
^(?!(?:\S*\s){5})([a-zA-Z\'\s]+)$
If there are five or more spaces in the string, five will be matched by the negative lookahead, and the whole match will fail. If there are four or less, the original regex will be matched.
Screw the regex.
Using a regex here seems to be creating a problem for a solution instead of just solving a problem.
This task should be 'easy' for even a novice programmer, and the novel idea of regex has polluted our minds!.
1: Get Input
2: Trim White Space
3: If this makes sence, trim out any 'bad' characters.
4: Use the "split" utility provided by your language to break it into words
5: Return the first 5 Words.
ROCKET SCIENCE.
replies
what do you mean screw the regex? your obviously a VB programmer.
Regex is the most efficient way to work with strings. Learn them.
No. Php, toyed a bit with ruby, now going manically into perl.
There are some thing ( like this case ) where the regex based alternative is computationally and logically exponentially overly complex for the task.
I've parse entire php source files with regex, I'm not exactly a novice in their use.
But there are many cases, such as this, where you're employing a logging company to prune your rose bush.
I could do all steps 2 to 5 with regex of course, but they would be simple and atomic regex, with no weird backtracking syntax or potential for recursive searching.
The steps 1 to 5 I list above have a known scope, known range of input, and there's no ambiguity to how it functions. As to your regex, the fact you have to get contributions of others to write something so simple is proving the point.
I see somebody marked my post as offensive, I am somewhat unhappy I can't mark this fact as offensive to me. ;)
Proof Of Pudding:
sub getNames{
my #args = #_;
my $text = shift #args;
my $num = shift #args;
# Trim Whitespace from Head/End
$text =~ s/^\s*//;
$text =~ s/\s*$//;
# Trim Bad Characters (??)
$text =~ s/[^a-zA-Z\'\s]//g;
# Tokenise By Space
my #words = split( /\s+/, $text );
#return 0..n
return #words[ 0 .. $num - 1 ];
} ## end sub getNames
print join ",", getNames " Hello world this is a good test", 5;
>> Hello,world,this,is,a
If there is anything ambiguous to anybody how that works, I'll be glad to explain it to them. Noted that I'm still doing it with regexps. Other languages I would have used their native "trim" functions provided where possible.
Bollocks -->
I first tried this approach. This is your brain on regex. Kids, don't do regex.
This might be a good start
/([^\s]+
(\s[^\s]+
(\s[^\s]+
(\s[^\s]+
(\s[^\s]+|)
|)
|)
|)
)/
( Linebroken for clarity )
/([^\s]+(\s[^\s]+(\s[^\s]+(\s[^\s]+|)|)|))/
( Actual )
I've used [^\s]+ here instead of your A-Z combo for succintness, but the point is here the nested optional groups
ie:
(Hello( this( is( example))))
(Hello( this( is( example( two)))))
(Hello( this( is( better( example))))) three
(Hello( this( is()))))
(Hello( this()))
(Hello())
( Note: this, while being convoluted, has the benefit that it will match each name into its own group )
If you want readable code:
$word = '[^\s]+';
$regex = "/($word(\s$word(\s$word(\s$word(\s$word|)|)|)|)|)/";
( it anchors around the (capture|) mantra of "get this, or get nothing" )
#Sir Psycho : Be careful about your assumptions here. What about hyphenated names? Dotted names (e.g. Brian R. Bondy) and so on?
Here's the answer that you're most likely looking for:
^[a-zA-Z']+(\s[a-zA-Z']+){0,4}$
That says (in English): "From start to finish, match one or more letters, there can also be a space followed by another 'name' up to four times."
BTW: Why do you want them to have apostrophes anywhere in the name?
^([a-zA-Z']+\s){0,4}[a-zA-Z']+$
This assumes you want 4 spaces inside this string (i.e. you have trimmed it)
Edit: If you want 4 spaces anywhere I'd recommend not using regex - you'd be better off using a substr_count (or the equivalent in your language).
I also agree with pipTheGeek that there are so many different ways of writing names that you're probably best off trusting the user to get their name right (although I have found that a lot of people don't bother using capital letters on ecommerce checkouts).
Match multiple whitespace followed by two characters at the end of the line.
Related problem ----
From a string, remove trailing 2 characters preceded by multiple white spaces... For example, if the column contains this string -
" 'This is a long string with 2 chars at the end AB "
then, AB should be removed while retaining the sentence.
Solution ----
select 'This is a long string with 2 chars at the end AB' as "C1",
regexp_replace('This is a long string with 2 chars at the end AB',
'[[[:space:]][a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z]]*$') as "C2" from dual;
Output ----
C1
This is a long string with 2 chars at the end AB
C2
This is a long string with 2 chars at the end
Analysis ----
regular expression specifies - match and replace zero or more occurences (*) of a space ([:space:]) followed by combination of two characters ([a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z]) at the end of the line.
Hope this is useful.